Despite the successes of the racial middle ground, the reasons that led to its creation also led to its demise. Lashes of school segregations and Gentlemen's Agreements were bound to leave some scars on the Japanese image of the United States. More than anything else, the California Crisis exposed the hypocrisy of the American racial system and Japanese observers of the events slowly began to call into question the legitimacy of the American model.

The end of the negotiation zone between Japan and the United States was neither abrupt nor unexpected, but was a process that culminated into one event, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Signs of discontent were, of course, already visible years prior to the peace settlement. First, the California Crisis was far from over. The Gentlemen's Agreement had temporarily calmed minds about the immigration issue in the United States, but it did not solve the problem of the Japanese presence on American soil. Second, there was a growing feeling of irritation on part of the Japanese for being continuously relegated to the rank of a second-rate nation. Third, the loss of prestige of the American model in Japanese eyes was part of the global collapse of the Eurocentric model as a whole: the First World War as well as ravenous Western imperialism led individuals in non-European nations to reconsider the legitimacy of Eurocentrism. This occurred in Japan too, where thinkers began to explore alternative world views. The combination of these factors eventually led to the collapse of the racial middle ground.

The crisis goes on: the Alien Land Law of 1913

Two aspects of the middle ground have been emphasised throughout this work: human agency and cooperation. Two parties agree that a negotiation zone is mutually beneficial, and agents act in a framework that is acceptable for both to produce such a zone. ‘Beneficial’ and ‘acceptable’ are key. Since the inception of the middle ground described in these pages, the Japanese government had been accepting the Western framework because it proved beneficial for the nation: the preservation of national sovereignty, the possible acceptance as a great power, and, theoretically, avoiding the shame of being branded as an unwanted race – all these expectations were somewhat realistic after Japan had reached the standard of civilisation.

Yet the task of creating and maintaining the middle ground was an arduous and long process that spanned several decades.

Earlier and contemporary authors had observed the systematic aspects involved in the use of money for the nation’s trade. Locke’s novelty lies in the fact that he observed those systemic connections solely from the perspective of economic phenomena; and ‘necessities’ and the necessity of money constituted the main tool through which he described the phenomena associated with the emerging monetary economy. Instead of making the classic theological reference to usury, Locke built the theoretical foundation and normativity of money on the system of trade and its necessities, and hence on the survival of the nation. In this way he was able to gloss over the earlier theological discourse.

Chapter 7 concludes Making International Institutions Work. It opens with a brief review of the main findings and the role of each stage of the empirical investigation in establishing them. I then discuss the book’s contributions to international relations, international political economy, and political science as well as other fields of social science. The third section draws out lessons for policy and practice. I identify a variety of stakeholder-specific strategies for safeguarding policy autonomy and promoting accountability reforms, contributing to a lively ongoing debate among academics and practitioners over how to achieve an effective and accountable global institutional architecture. Finally, I reflect on the book’s implications for some notable emerging issues in global governance – including responding to international crises and challenges to the modern liberal order – outlining promising avenues for further research.

Chapter 7 examines Benjamin Worsley’s manifesto of natural sciences that contained utopian ideas about human capacity to overcome death, if only the right scientific approach and the right moral attitude could be achieved. Revelation substituted what Boyle believed was the impossibility of grasping moral natural law rationally. Therefore, the study of moral natural laws is practically irrelevant in his work. Boyle moved constantly between a self-sufficient and mechanistic idea of the physical world and recourse to an infinitely wise God as a guide to human knowledge. He wrote several ambitious works on these issues, which are nowadays considered foundational to the Scientific Revolution but remain practically unknown beyond specialist circles nowadays. The chapter looks in particular at The Origine of Formes and Qualities and A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv’d Notion of Nature. These works articulate Boyle’s ambition to transmute everything in nature and his momentous critique of nature, a metaphysical and sacred concept that had been part of Western culture since at least the era of the great Greek philosophers.

The natural philosopher Robert Boyle, mentor of John Locke, took the view that the aim of science was ‘the Empire over the Creatures’. The task of Chapter 6 is to show how Robert Boyle’s new political system for an economics of natural science, primarily involving the utilitarian exploitation of nature and of trade, connected with his contribution to the development of a form of natural law and natural philosophy shorn of moral natural law. That idea drew on classical theological teachings on dominion over creatures (as set out in Genesis 1:26) together with the economic goal of making natural sciences productive – also considering the significant expansion that the British Empire was undergoing at that point in time. Theological principles about an omnipotent and bountiful God were crucial to Boyle’s plans for the achievement of broader management of nature, but as a rule he avoided consideration of anthropological theology and moral natural law in his scientific writings. A close reading of Of the Usefulness of Experimentall Natural Philosophy and of the Aretology helps in articulating these ideas.

Chapter 5 considers the theology and moral philosophy of the respected theologian and moral casuist, Robert Sanderson. The divine Sanderson despaired of the unfortunate consequences for practical morality of denying the responsibility and freedom of individuals. In its historical context his doubt amounted to finally rejecting the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Scholars consider Sanderson’s Several Cases of Conscience Discussed in Ten Lectures in the Divinity School at Oxford a main reference for Locke in the writing of the unpublished Two Tracts of Government and his foundational Essays on the Law of Nature. Sanderson’s work sets out a moral philosophy of free will reinforced by mechanical overtones of necessary causality in reasoning. The chapter briefly analyses this type of ‘mechanical conscience’ and shows how Sanderson was committed to a de facto theory of government.

Chapter 4 begins the qualitative portion of the empirical examination. I conduct an in-depth comparative case study of the three central pillars of global food security governance: the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). I begin by detailing the matching strategy used to identify these institutions, documenting their similar levels of several possible determinants of performance and policy autonomy. The bulk of the chapter traces how differences in de facto – but not de jure – policy autonomy have set the institutions on divergent performance trajectories: The WFP and IFAD are autonomous and widely recognized as effective, whereas the FAO is state-dominated and notorious for performance problems. Rather than formal design features, I locate the origin of this variation in the institutions’ distinct governance tasks and patterns of operational collaboration with non-state actors. Interviews and archival data gathered during fieldwork at the institutions’ Rome headquarters adduce key pieces of evidence in this process-tracing exercise.

This chapter elaborates the book’s theoretical framework. It proceeds in three stages. First, based on a microfoundational analysis of the incentives facing states and international bureaucrats, I make the case that the former are more liable than the latter to engage in opportunistic behavior that imperils institutional performance. Second, I flesh out the concept of policy autonomy, explaining how its different components provide the basis for gains in performance and why it cannot be reliably established and maintained through institutional design. Third, I explore the true origins of policy autonomy, elaborating the causal mechanisms by which (certain types of) operational alliances and governance tasks insulate bureaucrats against state capture. The chapter concludes by summarizing the framework’s observable implications at the macro and micro levels.

The goal of the final chapter is to examine the central role of necessities in the epistemological, moral and political theory of An Essay of Human Understanding and of the Two Treatises of Government. A study of the former shows Locke’s preoccupation with classical moral questions such as happiness and the ‘good objects of desires’ and how necessities helped him to strike a balance between tradition and the new science. As a rule of thumb of proper conduct, knowledge of necessities leads to the preservation of life, a human being’s most important duty to God. His doctrine of necessities is what made it possible for Locke to develop the theory of the public good with which, it is argued, he attempted to defeat the egoist theory of self-interest. Examination of his conception of property and money through the lens of human necessities shows a certain ambiguity in Locke’s normative ideals. Nevertheless, my conclusion is that above other considerations underlying the capital-oriented ideals of the period, the last word of Locke’s political theory is the public good represented by preservation and convenience for the commonwealth and, when possible, for the whole of humanity.

The implications for morality and natural law of Hobbes’s skilful employment of Neoplatonist metaphysics such as Avicenna’s, entailing a sharp division between the human soul and the human body, are spelled out in Chapter 3. This shows that the concept of need, rather than right is central to Hobbes’s natural law and political theory. Judgements concerning needs, including the needs of others, represent a constant source of legitimacy for acting in the state of nature and in the commonwealth. A thorough analysis of the doctrine of necessity in Leviathan, Hobbes’s masterpiece, follows. The superior and absolute sovereignty that Leviathan evaluates and proposes is the true and scientific concept of sovereignty in a commonwealth, by reference to the needs of human nature and also in accordance with divine command. Hobbes exploits his doctrine of metaphysics of necessity to explain that that type of absolute sovereignty is compatible with freedom; after all, each free act of every human being is necessary in the sense of a metaphysics of necessity.

To understand our current world crises, it is essential to study the origins of the systems and institutions we now take for granted. This book takes a novel approach to charting intellectual, scientific and philosophical histories alongside the development of the international legal order by studying the philosophy and theology of the Scientific Revolution and its impact on European natural law, political liberalism and political economy. Starting from analysis of the work of Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle and John Locke on natural law, the author incorporates a holistic approach that encompasses global legal matters beyond the foundational matters of treaties and diplomacy. The monograph promotes a sustainable transformation of international law in the context of related philosophy, history and theology. Tackling issues such as nature, money, necessities, human nature, secularism and epistemology, which underlie natural lawyers’ thinking, Associate Professor García-Salmones explains their enduring relevance for international legal studies today.